Cable operators across the US vow to block child porn

18 cable operators across the US have signed an agreement with the National …

18 cable operators that provide Internet connections to 87 percent of US homes vowed today to take measures to limit the distribution of child pornography. The voluntary measures are part of an agreement among the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), and the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG), and appear to follow in the foosteps of previous agreements pushed by lawmakers in the US.

"We are deeply grateful for this industry-wide attack on child pornography," said NCMEC CEO Ernie Allen in a statement. "It is not possible to arrest and prosecute every offender. We must be creative and build new public-private partnerships to address this insidious problem more effectively. Today's announcement represents a bold step forward."

Under the Memorandum of Undesrtanding, the cable operators involved will use NCMEC's list of websites that contain child pornography to ensure that the sites will not be hosted on servers controlled by them. They will also report instances of child porn on their servers to NCMEC's tip line (which will presumably be added to the list once confirmed), and will "revise their policies around other potential sources of child pornography, such as, for example, newsgroups."

The move appears to build upon previous steps taken by lawmakers and cable operators to block access to child porn online. Last month, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced an agreement with several major Internet service providers that will see them purge any child porn images stored on their servers and block subscriber access to newsgroups that offered such content. Earlier htis month, Cuomo announced that several more ISPs had joined the list of those blocking access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet along with the launch of a new website, nystopchildporn, that lists cable companies in New York that have not yet signed the agreement. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Edmund G. Brown recently hopped on board, too, by asking a number of Californian ISPs to implement a similar policy against newsgroups containing child porn.

Taking action against child porn is one thing, but these latest agreements indicate a growing confidence in further regulating content that could be considered harmful to the public good (and there is no doubt that child porn falls into that category). The fear is that agreements such as this could open the door to restricting other content down the road.